Playtested a new game for the first time. Our githzerai scouts first traveled to Heaven, and decided that was a terrible place to establish a new home. So we traveled to Hell and decided that was an awful place to live as well.

So we moved on and found a desolate desert world that was full of magic and haunted by ghosts. Once we appeased the souls of the dead, magically irrigated the desert and tamed the giant psionic bees, it became a decent enough place for is to live and we settled there.

Dumb idea I'll never finish: a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG where your four stats are Teenage, Mutant, Ninja, and Turtle. Michelangelo is the strongest in Teenage. Donatello is the best at Mutant. Leonardo is the most Ninja, and Raphael is the strongest in Turtle.

Last night, we determined that no one was enthusiastic about our Call of Cthulhu game, so we scrapped it and started an impromptu Unknown Armies campaign, in the same setting but 90 years later.

Our previous PCs encountered something horrible, and blew themselves up dealing with it. Now decades later some new characters are looking into the same occult troubles, which have only gotten worse with time.

In Japanese myth, tanuki are trickster spirits, who shapeshift and play pranks on people. Among their powers are using their gigantic magical testicles to make illusionary places and things. Stories include tanuki disguising themselves as shopkeepers and transforming their testicles into the shop.

TL,DR I've been playing Animal Crossing since 2002 and I just realized that I was walking around inside a raccoon-dog's scrotum the entire time.

I want to run a D&D campaign where the big villain is a lich bard. He was originally a bard but he became a lich so he'd have centuries to perfect his poetry. His massive villainous scheme is to manipulate cultures over centuries, starting wars and introducing cultural shifts and destroying whole kingdoms of people. His ultimate goal, though, is just to change how the Common language is pronounced, so that he can find a word to rhyme in one of the stanzas of his poem.

Played lots of boardgames over the holiday break for #Thanskgaming. That included Apples to Apples, 7 Wonders, Mysterium, Pandemic, Pandemic: Iberia, Love Letter, Love Letter: The Hobbit edition, and Small World Underground. I think I only won the co-op games (and only 2 out of the three of those).

Me: I should not design a cooperative board game based off of Animal Crossing.

Also me: But you could have fruit and fish as cards that replenish a little bit each turn, and then by fulfilling requests from animals you get the resources to build cool things in your home, which earn you points in the endgame...

Maybe I can make the danger scale makes sense by using a graphical shorthand. The card has a danger scale, which is 5 or 6 icons of cards that you would draw, but more or less of them are covered with big red Xs (or some icon meaning danger). More red Xs = more danger, but you draw cards equal to the open card icons on the right.

So I'm making a game where certain tasks have a Danger rating (ranging from 1-5). But due to how other mechanics work, a higher rating is safer for the PCs. (You draw outcome cards and pick one, so more=more likely to get a safe one).

I think many players would intuitively expect that a higher Danger score was more dangerous. Is there some easy way to convey that the opposite is true?

If I rename "Danger" to "safety" it doesn't get across that these tasks are the ones that might kill you.

I spent a couple weeks at one point making notes about how to design a Betrayal-like Legacy game. In the end I determined that making a Betrayal like game was really hard, making a Legacy style game was really hard, and combining the two was a project beyond the scope of what I could accomplish.

The #1stRPG I remember playing was Basic D&D (maybe the 1983 red box?) run by my older brother. I was around 9-10 years old.

My magic-user was clearly modeled after Skeeve from the Myth Adventures books. We used a miniature of the Peter Davison Doctor Who, because it looked pretty much like Phil Foglio's illustrations of Skeeve.

At one point I charmed a goblin. All the goblins spoke French, because my brother was taking French in high school.

Current project: A murder mystery larp for my daughter's birthday party. The difficult part is that the players are all 9-13 years old and many won't have any role-playing experience. Keeping the story kid-friendly removes many of the motivations you might otherwise use in a murder plot.